In the world of bicycles today, disc brakes are the present and future stoppers. Calipers, V-brakes, Center Pulls, U-Brakes, and Cantilever brakes may never go away. These oldies but goodies, are being run over by all kinds disc brakes.
Just like anything else, there are many flavors of disc brakes. You’ve got your hydraulic ones with dual pistons, mechanicals with a single piston, cable actuated hydraulics with 2 pistons, Hydraulic brakes with four pistons to slow those crazy Downhill racers. My pick, for the way I ride are mechanical disc brakes with dual pistons. Simple things that work well, make the most sense to me.
TRP Spyke brakes were the first double piston mechanical disc brakes on my radar. It was Wednesday, my Surly Fat Bike who insisted I look at the Rever MTN1 brake sets. Her motivation was that Rever use her favorite color in their logo. Brake set? I asked her why do we need a whole brake set. Why can’t we reuse the levers, brake cables and housing presently attached to her with orange cable ties? She also had 160 mm rotors installed on her hubs. It made no sense to me. I asked her why can’t we just get some new double piston calipers?
She told me that it was obvious to her that the folks at Rever had their poop in a pile. They offer a brake system kit for each end of the bike. Rever make two MTN1 kits. One that has a right hand CNC’d lever and the other with a left. Each MTN1 kit comes with a lever, mechanical dual piston calipers that utilize semi-metallic pads. Additionally in this amazingly designed package are a 
bunch of IS adaptors to mount the caliper on a variety of bikes. A 160 mm rotor, compression-less housing, an ultra-slick stainless steel cable, plus they give you bolts for everything, nosed ferrules, a cable crimp, little bumpers to go on the housing to protect your frame, a Torx wrench, and a very well designed set of instructions. It is a handsome box full of stuff you want.
I’ve just got to talk about the cables and housing that come in the Rever MTN1 kit.
A year ago at a trade show I saw some highly polished stainless steel shift and brake cables made by Jagwire. It was love at first sight! These cables flow through housing with incredible ease and have no coating on them that can rub off. The other bit I saw was Jagwire’s compression-less brake housing. Normal brake housing has a cork screw like metal inner, housed in a plastic coating. It compresses a tiny bit, like a spring when you pull the brake lever. The Jagwire compression-less housing uses a linear metal liner, similar to shift housing but it has a woven Kevlar layer before they add the plastic outer sheath. This housing resists being compressed by the cable when you squeeze the lever allowing more of your gesture to be translated into braking. Imagine my surprise and delight when I unpacked the Rever MNT1 stuff and found my favorite cable and housing inside! Nowhere does Rever call out that they include these high end cable and housing gems in the MNT1 kit.
Installation of calipers that have two moving pistons makes centering them on the rotor really easy. Once everything was bolted down I had one question. How do I get more spring tension on the actuation arm so that the lever snaps back when you let go? Well, there is a teeny, tiny hole underneath the actuation arm. Stick a 2 mm Allen key in there and turn it clockwise and voilà you get better lever feel.
The preliminary pad burn-in and cable and housing setting happened in the stand. Wednesday was anxious. She wanted to see what these brakes could do. I quickly dressed in my bike gear as not to anger her. From our house, the street to the trail is a gentle downhill that allowed us to finish the pad burn in.
Wednesday and I like these brakes a lot. It is hard to scientifically quantify the difference between the MTN1 brakes and the OEM Hayes MX Comp single piston brakes that Wednesday came dressed with. The MX Comps are some of the best and easy to maintain single piston brakes I have used. Even so, we can tell you that less hand pressure is needed to ease Wednesday to a stop with the MTN1 brakes. Their ability to slow our progress felt smoother and really controllable. They felt more like a dimmer than an on off light switch.
That’s all I’ve got for now, except, the lure of an 180mm front rotor on Wednesday’s front hub is hanging out there. I blame Rever because in their beautifully designed package they included and IS adaptor for 180mm front rotors. Isn’t anything worth doing, worth over doing?
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